CANR
WORK TITLE: THE CURATOR
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.owen-king.com/
CITY: New Paltz
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 264
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/03/17/owen-king-son-of-stephen-on-his-debut-novel/1987855/ http://www.npr.org/2013/06/21/193888306/owen-king-it-runs-in-the-family
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 21, 1977, in Bangor, ME; son of Stephen (a writer) and Tabitha (a writer) King; married Kelly Braffet (a writer).
EDUCATION:Graduated from Vassar College; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Producer on CBS All Access Mini-series, The Stand.
AWARDS:John Gardner Award for Short Fiction; Dragon Awards for Best Horror Novel, 2018, for Sleeping Beauties; Fink Award.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and journals, including Book, One Story, Prairie Schooner, and Bellingham Review; coauthor of the screenplay Fade Away with Joe Hill.
SIDELIGHTS
Short-story writer Owen King is the son of famed authors Stephen and Tabitha King, but he makes a dedicated effort to ensure his own authorial identity is separate from that of his parents. “I didn’t want to write a book as Stephen King’s son, because all I did was get born, and that’s not much of an accomplishment,” King remarked to Gilbert Cruz in an Entertainment Weekly profile. “I understand people’s curiosity and yet, I’ve made a really decided effort to write in a way that’s individual to me, and do as much as I can possibly do on my own without being insane about it,” he commented in a Time interview with Andrea Sachs.
We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, King’s debut collection of short stories, contains a lengthy novella that anchors the collection. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the title novella a “powerful exploration of the flimsiness of political moral certainty compared to the strength of the unpredictable emotions that end up motivating individuals’ actions.” Set in the aftermath of the controversial 2000 U.S. presidential election, the novella follows fifteen-year-old George Claiborne as he struggles to accept his mother Emma’s upcoming marriage to oafish and embarrassing Dr. Vic. To help him cope, George spends much of his time with his grandfather, Henry, a union organizer and stalwart Democrat who seethes at what he perceives to be the stolen presidential election. As George seeks ways to sabotage his mother’s relationship with Dr. Vic, he and his grandfather devise traps to ambush the vandal who has defaced Henry’s front-yard tributes to Al Gore. Ultimately, the family’s political obsessions threaten not only Emma’s relationship but the whole family’s unity.
Some of King’s stories display a touch of the same macabre for which his father is known. “Frozen Animals,” for one, involves messy and primitive dental work performed in exchange for sex by a traveling dentist in the northern wilderness. A two-headed circus freak performs an abortion on a baseball player’s girlfriend in “Wonders.” Other tales, such as “My Second Wife,” address the strong emotional issues of coping with breakup and loneliness. New York Times reviewer Jon Zobenica found that the tales in the book were too politically inspired and served more to put forward King’s opinions than to tell stories. The title novella “is parable as polemic,” Zobenica remarked, but the book’s “remaining stories reveal enough descriptive and imaginative flair to suggest that with time and discipline King may leave behind the op-ed pieces that masquerade as summer fiction,” Zobenica commented.
Other critics were more favorably inclined toward the collection as a whole. “Funny and poignant, these stories are textured gems,” commented Jonathan Durbin in People, while a Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book a “compelling, imaginative debut collection,” concluding: “This original collection heralds the arrival of the next generation.”
In 2013 King published the novel Double Feature. Young filmmaker Sam Dolan attempts to create his own voice in the industry despite his frustration over his B-movie actor father, Booth Dolan. When Sam’s debut film is unalterably edited, he destroys the only copy, setting in motion a series of events that trouble him for the following decade.
A contributor to Insatiable Booksluts insisted that the characters in the novel “are real, and flawed, and fantastic. You want to invite them over for dinner (and maybe hide the knives before they arrive). You want to spend time with them, talking to them and getting to know them and laughing with them and being a part of their lives. There’s a feel of Irving to these people; that same lovable misfit quality, that same fierce love you feel for them when you get to know them.” The contributor found the novel to be “very intelligent, very witty, and very wise.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, David Thomson lamented “the overwriting; the scraps of screenplay and text messaging; and the elaborate structure that never convinced me it had a purpose beyond being willful and showy and afraid of directness”; he called these pieces of the novel that the reader will “just have to endure.” Thomson commented that “the ending of the book collapses in sentimentality and a weary urge to bring the surviving characters together in a party. In short, there is a great deal of excess, as if King had not quite found the discipline or the confidence to trust the resonant simplicity he displays when Allie sees a snapping turtle crossing the road and knows it is in danger.”
Reviewing the novel in A.V. Club, Kevin McFarland concluded that “ Double Feature is affecting at times, but King’s style often mirrors his protagonist’s filmmaking tendencies: too serious, and clever but unfocused. It’s a promising first novel, but it stumbles to reach a satisfying conclusion, however ambiguous.” In a review in Library Journal, Jennifer B. Stidham opined that “fans of John Irving, Tom Perrotta, Jonathan Tropper, and Nick Hornby will appreciate” King’s first novel. Booklist contributor Cortney Ophoff labeled the novel “entertaining and thought-provoking.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly found the author’s prose to be “artful, perceptive about people and their ‘warrens of self that go beyond understanding,’ and sometimes very funny.”
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In 2015 King teamed up with novelist Mark Jude Poirier to write the wild alien spoof graphic novel, Intro to Alien Invasion, illustrated by Nancy Ahn. A megalomaniacal professor stole some soil from a meteor crash site in Siberia and smuggled it back to his office in a college in Vermont. That bad decision soon results in tiny alien blue bugs thawing from the permafrost, infecting the students, and turning them into possessed corpses. When a freak hurricane blocks the college from the outside world, overachiever Stacey and a gaggle of stereotypical bros, goths, and theater kids fight back against the alien invasion.
The book satirizes B-list monster movies with cheesy aliens, college tropes with horny students, with plenty of pop culture references. “The lovely twist here is that the damsels save themselves and almost everyone else,” declared Booklist contributor Eva Volin, who enjoyed the campy sci-fi fun and Ahn’s attention to detail amping up the antics. Calling the book too infectious to resist, a Kirkus Reviews writer noted: “While the trajectory feels familiar, the story is told with energy and a subversive charm somewhere between Edgar Wright and Eli Roth.”
Sleeping Beauties, a New York Times bestselling first collaboration of Owen King and his father Stephen King, is a near future horror story of epic proportions. A strange condition is afflicting only women, who fall asleep and cannot be woken up, with a white, gauze-like membrane growing over their faces. At first appearing sporadically, the disease soon spreads everywhere, including at a women’s prison in a small West Virginia town. The prison’s psychiatrist, Dr. Clinton Norcross, and his wife, county sheriff Lila Norcross, investigate the cause of the disease. They find one woman, Eve Black, who seems to be immune and possibly connected to the disease’s origin. Without women, the men become violent, succumbing to their primal urges and forming warring factions, demanding that Eve be handed over to them. Meanwhile, if the gauze on the sleeping women is broken, they become violent and attack the men around them; however, while asleep, their consciousness is transported to an idyllic land, peaceful and heavenly, devoid of the presence of men.
In an interview with Alison Flood in the London Guardian, Owen described the different tone of the book he wrote with his famous father, it’s “a fantasy novel more than a horror. It’s pretty murderous in places – a lot of people getting torn apart and shot and dying gruesomely – but it doesn’t have ghosts, there are no scary clowns.” Despite a slow start with lengthy setup and numerous characters, “The authors’ writing is seamless and naturally flowing,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Online at Bookreporter.com, Ray Palen praised Sleeping Beauties, saying: “this father/son pairing is a huge success, and even at over 700 pages, it’s a thrilling novel that never lets up, loses interest or intensity, and is exciting right up to the very satisfying conclusion.
King’s 2023 Victorian fantasy, The Curator is an expanded version of his 2014 short story. In a city nicknamed The Fairest, the government is in turmoil and on the verge of a revolution. Amid the upheaval, Dora, an orphan and former servant, wants to discover where her brother went after he died. She believes the answer is at The Museum of Psykical Research where he had worked. Although the museum burned down, she gets her lover and rebel officer Robert to get her a curatorship at the bizarre National Museum of the Worker next door. Meanwhile, a mysterious Morgue Ship hauling souls of people abused during their lives appears on the river. Dora begins to uncover sinister conspiracies. A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented: “The book can seem overstuffed at times…but for the most part King carries it off successfully, with vivid prose, excellent minor characters, and a scrappy, every-which-way inventiveness.” With moments of horror and humor, “King’s creative worldbuilding is admirable and he makes even walk-on characters feel fully realized,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2013, Cortney Ophoff, review of Double Feature, p. 21; September 15, 2015, Eva Volin, review of Intro to Alien Invasion, p. 50.
Entertainment Weekly, June 24, 2005, Gilbert Cruz, “Something in the Heir.”
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2005, review of We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, p. 560; July 15, 2015, review of Intro to Alien Invasion; January 1, 2023, review of The Curator.
Library Journal, February 15, 2013, Jennifer B. Stidham, review of Double Feature, p. 93.
New York Times, July 24, 2005, Jon Zobenica, “We’re All in This Together: At the End of Wretch Lane.”
New York Times Book Review, April 7, 2013, David Thomson, review of Double Feature, p. 13.
People, July 25, 2005, Jonathan Durbin, review of We’re All in This Together, p. 51.
Publishers Weekly, May 9, 2005, review of We’re All in This Together, p. 40; December 17, 2012, review of Double Feature, p. 33.
Time, July 7, 2005, Andrea Sachs, “Galley Girl: The Son Also Rises.”
USA Today, March 18, 2013, Bob Minzesheimer, “Owen King’s Debut Novel Is Not about His Famous Dad,” p. 7B.
ONLINE
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (March 25, 2013), Kevin McFarland, review of Double Feature.
BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (August 18, 2005), Owen King, “Behind the Book.”
Bookreporter, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (October 5, 2017), Ray Palen, review of Sleeping Beauties.
Insatiable Booksluts, http://insatiablebooksluts.com/ (April 26, 2013), review of Double Feature.
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (December 6, 2017), Alison Flood, “‘It’s Pretty Murderous’: Owen King on Writing an Apocalyptic Shocker with His Father Stephen.
Owen King Home Page, http://www.owen-king.com (October 2, 2013).*
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (July 31, 2017), review of Sleeping Beauties; (January 9, 2023), review of The Curator.
Owen King is the author of Double Feature, and We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories. He is the coauthor of Sleeping Beauties and Intro to Alien Invasion and the coeditor of Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories. His next novel, The Curator, will be published in March 2023. He lives in upstate New York with his family.
Owen King
(Owen Philip King)
USA flag (b.1979)
Husband of Kelly Braffet, Son of Stephen King and Tabitha King
Owen King (born Owen Philip King) is an American author and the youngest son of authors Stephen and Tabitha King. He has two older siblings, Naomi and Joseph Hillstrom King. He is married to the writer Kelly Braffet. A poem, "For Owen", is included in the story collection Skeleton Crew by his father. In the story collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, the non-fictional story Head Down is about Owen's Little League baseball team.
Genres: Horror
New Books
March 2023
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The Curator
Novels
Double Feature (2013)
Sleeping Beauties (2017) (with Stephen King)
The Curator (2023)
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Collections
We're All in This Together (2005)
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Graphic Novels
Intro to Alien Invasion (2015) (with Nancy Ahn and Mark Jude Poirier)
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Anthologies edited
Who Can Save Us Now? (2008) (with John McNally)
Owen King
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For the politician, see Owen King (politician).
Owen King
Born Owen Philip King
February 21, 1977 (age 45)
Bangor, Maine, U.S.
Occupation Author
Alma mater Vassar College
Columbia University
Spouse Kelly Braffet (m. 2007)
Parents
Stephen King (father)
Tabitha King (mother)
Relatives Joe Hill (brother)
Website
www.owen-king.com
Owen Philip King (born February 21, 1977) is an American author and the younger son of authors Stephen and Tabitha King.[1][2]
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
3 Reception
4 Personal life
5 Awards
6 Works
6.1 Literary
6.2 Film and television
7 References
8 External links
Early life
King was born in 1977 in Maine to parents Tabitha and Stephen King.[3] He has two older siblings, Naomi King and Joseph Hillström King. He was raised in Bangor, Maine, showing an interest in writing during high school.[4] King attended Vassar College and Columbia University, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.[5]
Career
King published his first book, We're All in This Together, a collection of three short stories and a novella, in 2005. His short fiction has been published in various journals, such as One Story and Prairie Schooner.[6] His debut novel, Double Feature, was published in 2013.
Sleeping Beauties, a collaboration between Owen King and his father, Stephen King, was published in September 2017 and is set in a women's prison in West Virginia.[7] King is also working with filmmaker Josh Boone on adapting the Clive Barker novel The Great and Secret Show for television.[8]
In 2020, he became producer of the CBS All Access Mini-series adaption of his father's novel The Stand,[9] He also co-wrote a new ending with his father exclusively for the miniseries.
Reception
The reception for King's collection We're All in This Together was positive, with both the Los Angeles Times and Independent giving it positive reviews.[10][11]
King's first full-length novel, Double Feature, was called "overwritten" in a review in The New York Times.[12]
King's graphic novel Intro to Alien Invasion reception was mixed, with Publishers Weekly opining the comic was unable to consistently transcend its "B movie source material,"[13] while Booklist called the spoofing of B-list material "highly successful".[14]
Personal life
King is married to writer Kelly Braffet (born 1976) and lives in New Paltz, New York.[15]
Awards
John Gardner Award[5]
Fink Award[16]
Nominated for a "National Magazine Award"[17]
Works
Literary
Collections and novels
We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories (July 5, 2005)
"We're All in This Together"
"Frozen Animals"
"Wonders"
"Snake"
"My Second Wife"
Double Feature (March 19, 2013)
Sleeping Beauties (September 22, 2017), co-written with Stephen King
The Curator (announced for March 7, 2023[18])
Editor
Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories (July 15, 2008)
"The Meerkat"
Comics
Intro to Alien Invasion (September 15, 2015), co-written with Mark Jude Poirier, drawings by Nancy Ahn
Sleeping Beauties (February 2020), co-written with Stephen King, adapted by Rio Youers, illustrations by Alison Sampson
Anthology contributions
Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Stories edited by John McNally (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003)
"Wonders"
When I Was A Loser edited by John McNally (Free Press, 2007)
"Sports"
HANG THE DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists edited by Angus Cargill (Faber & Faber, 2008)
"Spit it Out! The Top Ten Stutter Songs"
The Late American Novel: Writers On The Future Of Books edited by Jeff Martin & C. Max Magee (Soft Skull, 2011)
"Not Quite as Dire as Having Your Spine Ripped Out, But…"
Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on their Unshakeable Love for New York edited by Sari Botton (Touchstone, 2014)
"Hot Time in the Old Town"
The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages edited by Andrew Blauner (Simon & Schuster, November 10, 2015)
"Never Quite As Simple: On Luke 2:19"
Detours edited by Brian James Freeman (Cemetery Dance Publications, December 31, 2015)
"The Curator"
The Darkling Halls of Ivy edited by Lawrence Block (Subterranean Press, May 2020)
"That Golden Way"
Minor Characters edited by Jamie Clarke (Roundabout Press, April 15, 2021)
"Rabbit"
Short stories
"My Second Wife" (2001), The Bellingham Review #48, Spring 2001
"Wonders" (2002), Book Magazine #22, May/June 2002
"Frozen Animals" (2003), Harper Palate, Vol. 3 #1, Summer 2003
"The Cure" (2006), One Story #85, December 20, 2006
"Nothing is in Bad Taste" (2008), Subtropics #5, Winter/Spring 2008
"Home Brew" (2011), Prairie Schooner, Vol. 85 #2, Summer 2011
"The Idiot's Ghost" (2011), The Fairy Tale Review #7, The Brown Issue
"The Curator" (2014), Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #31, Dec. 2014
"Confederate Wall" (2015), Subtropics Issue 19, Spring/Summer 2015
"Positive Comments" (2018), Ploughshares/Emerson College, Kindle Single
Introductions/Afterwords
25 Years in the Word Mines: The Best of Graham Joyce by Graham Joyce (PS Publishing, September 2014)
Foreword by Owen King
The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker (Gauntlet Press, 2016)
Introduction by Owen King
The Devil's Own Work by Alan Judd (Valancourt Books, January 6, 2015)
Introduction by Owen King
Westlake Soul by Rio Youers (Short, Scary Tales Publications, October 2020)
Introduction by Owen King
The World Lansdalean: The authorized Joe R. Lansdale Bibliography by Joe Lansdale (Short, Scary Tales Publications, 2021)
Forward by Owen King
Web articles
"Singing Along To A Murderous Threat, NPR song of the day: "You Rascal You" by Hanni El Khatib" (December 15, 2011)
"A Gallery of Drama, NPR song of the day: "Change the Sheets" by Kathleen Edwards" (2/3/2012)
"Tear For Tear, Without Peer, NPR song of the day: "Look the Other Way" by Justin Townes Earle" (April 17, 2012)
"Interview with Tom Bissell" (April 17, 2012) The Rumpus
"The Biggest Thing Ever, an excerpt from Double Feature" (12/3/2012) Guernica
"Interview with Erin McKeown" (February 15, 2013) The Rumpus
"Book Notes: Double Feature" (March 19, 2013) Largehearted Boy
"Role Remix: Steve Buscemi" (March 19, 2013) Grantland
"(Title, If Any)" (4/1/2013) The Weeklings
"Best Guess: Owen King interprets the Exhibit Song Book, an exchange with singer/songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs" (7/11/2013)
"Interview with Peter Squires" (July 25, 2013) The Rumpus
"Matters of Faint Import, Vol. 1: "The Dress Code of Mumford & Sons" (September 24, 2013) The Weeklings
(w/James Jackson Toth, Elizabeth Nelson Bracy, and Timothy Bracy)
"Review of People Park by Pasha Malla" (11/4/2013) Publishers Weekly
"Matters of Faint Import, Vol. 2: "Holiday Special" (December 24, 2013) The Weeklings
(w/James Jackson Toth, Elizabeth Nelson Bracy, and Timothy Bracy)
"The Heiress, Review of Havisham by Ronald Frame" (January 1, 2014) Los Angeles Review of Books
"Director's Cut, Review of Mount Terminus by David Grand" (April 27, 2014) The New York Times Book Review
"Nine Librarian-Approved Headlines For The Rest Of The Season" (July 18, 2014) Just A Bit Outside
"Baseball's Greatest Hit" (July 29, 2014) Just A Bit Outside
"Spinners 5, Gades 0" (9/4/2014) Just A Bit Outside
"No, Pitchers Don't Have To Look Like Pitchers" (4/7/2015) Just A Bit Outside
"JABO Book Club: Alison Gordon's Foul Balls, A Conversation with Rob Neyer" (5/8/2015) Just A Bit Outside
"Baseball Language and The Players" (May 26, 2015) Just A Bit Outside
"Big Brother: A Conversation with Andrew Ervin" (6/3/2015) The Brooklyn Rail
Film and television
The Stand (2020 TV series), writer and producer
Let Me Go (The Right Way) (2022 short film), writer[19]
Sleeping Beauties: How Stephen King and son Owen joined forces in the nightmare business
By Anthony Breznican
September 25, 2017 at 10:15 AM EDT
Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission.
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Kings
CREDIT: COURTESY OF THE KING FAMILY
Sleeping Beauties
TYPE
Book
GENRE
Fiction
What Owen King remembers is how much time his father spent alone. Typing. Making up stories. Going to dark places in his head and coming out with books about killer cars, shape-shifting clowns, and burial grounds that bring the dead back to life.
That’s just how it was being Stephen King’s son. His mother did it, too. When Tabitha King was writing novels, both of Owen’s parents would disappear into that other dimension, hunched in front of a screen — the trance of a writer. They always came back, of course, just as pretty much all moms or dads leave every day for work and then come home. But it was their self-imposed solitary confinement daunted him. Haunted him.
“It was something they did every day, and they did it for hours at a time,” says Owen, 40. “It was kind of scary to look at how much time they spent alone, working at this thing. I didn’t really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.”
It turns out nightmare-making doesn’t have to be a lonely business. Stephen King and Owen King figured out a way to turn storytelling into a shared effort, collaborating on their new novel Sleeping Beauties, which hits shelves Tuesday.
Sleeping Beauties: A Novelby Stephen King, Owen King
CREDIT: SCRIBNER
The 700-page tome is part plague thriller and part fable. It’s the story of a sleeping sickness (nicknamed “Aurora” after Disney’s drowsy princess) that overtakes all the women and girls of the world, leaving the men of the planet to sort things out on their own. Guess how that works out.
When the women go under, they are enshrouded in mysterious, protective cocoons. Peel away wrapping to wake them, and the women’s bodies lash out, like savage sleepwalkers. The novel centers on a female prison in the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, where an ethereal woman named Evie is both the genesis of the plague (take that pun as you will) and the key to ending it.
Evie is beautiful, alluring, magical, and able to meld with the minds of moths, and foxes, and rats. She is mother nature, the princess locked away in a castle, and Maleficent, the wicked fairy, all rolled into one.
“She’s all those things,” Owen says, on a conference call with his father in Maine. “I don’t know about you, Dad, but I like her un-know-abilty. She really isn’t quite defined.”
“She has a twinkle of humor there that gives the character some texture, and she seems human as well as otherworldly. So she’s got a foot in each, and I like that about her,” adds Stephen, who just turned 70 last week. “I like the mystery of her.”
But if the men of the town of Dooling end her first, the women of their world will be lost forever, living out their days in a separate dimension, where they are starting society anew. Maybe they don’t really want to come back.
Stephen has collaborated a few times before (look for EW’s gallery tomorrow), most famously with Peter Straub on 1984’s The Talisman and co-writing comic books like IDW’s Road Rage with his other son, Joe Hill (The Fireman, NOS4A2).
0wenking
CREDIT: SCRIBNER (2)
But he hadn’t yet teamed up professionally with Owen, who’s the author of the 2014 novel Double Feature, a dramedy about a young filmmaker trying to make a masterpiece, and co-writer (with Mark Jude Poirior and artist Nancy Ahn) of Intro to Alien Invasion, a blackly funny 2015 graphic novel about an extra-terrestrial spore that infects a college campus.
Owen has inspired his father’s work before, however. Many times.
CHILDREN OF THE ANT FARM
Stephen has previously told EW he studied his own kids like “an ant farm” to glean insight into the many child characters who populate his novels. It is dedicated to Owen, his brother Joe, and their older sister Naomi with the inscription “My children taught me how to be free.” In the 1990 non-fiction essay “Head Down,” Stephen chronicled the ups and downs of Owen’s 1989 Little League team on the road to becoming Maine State Champions.
But being Stephen King’s son was … not very scary or weird. “I went to public schools in Bangor, Maine and had as normal a childhood as you could imagine someone could, living in an enormous red house and being the son of a millionaire best-selling writer,” Owen says. “I mean I actually had a strangely normal childhood despite all that.”
In some ways, they’ve been collaborating since Owen was just a kid. (We’ll get to the G.I. Joe character they invented a little later.) In the 1985 short-story collection Skeleton Crew, Stephen shared the achingly sweet poem “For Owen,” about walking his son to school down a road called Fruit Street and imagining together that the other students are blueberries, bananas, and oranges. It was also toddler Owen wandering too close to a busy road that led Stephen to explore every parent’s bleakest fear in Pet Sematary.
With Sleeping Beauties, the idea of a world of women enchanted into slumber was Owen’s, and he invited his dad to join him in writing the horror fantasy. The reason is obvious Stephen King, like Liam Neeson’s father in the Taken movies, has “a very particular set of skills.” He has passed them on to his kids, and this was a chance for father and son to use them together.
“I never said to them, ‘This is what I want for you to be, you should follow in my footsteps.’ But the house was full of books, and it was full of people who wrote stories, so they just came along,” Stephen King told EW. “To be asked by Owen to collaborate on a book was the greatest thing in the world. You see these signs that say Smith & Son’s hardware or stuff. So, sons do follow in their father’s footsteps. But in a specialized area of one of the arts? It was very gratifying to me.”
“We really did do it for fun,” Owen adds. “We didn’t know if it would be any good or that we would be happy with it. I was really excited that we could have this time together to talk and to work on something, even if it was just for a drawer.”
ONCE UPON A DREAM
Sleeping Beauties’ creators were seldom in the same place at the same time. Stephen splits his time between Maine and Florida, and Owen lives in upstate New York, with his wife, novelist Kelly Braffet (author of the 2013 thriller Save Yourself.) But they did get together to tour a real correctional facility together, to get a first-person sense of their setting.
It helped them add realism to a project that some friends joked sounded like a grindhouse exploitation flick: the Kings are working on a thriller set in a women’s prison? But despite its fantastical elements Sleeping Beauties is no Caged Heat or Big Doll House. It’s much closer to Orange Is the New Black — but with mystical undertones.
“We went to a women’s prison in New Hampshire, and any of those fantasy movies where you have a prison filled with these gorgeous women with great hair, we found out that wasn’t the case,” Stephen jokes. “A lot of the women there just seemed to be working through their time and not very happy about it, but doing what they have to do. We tried to put that in the book and make that prison as realistic as possible. I’m sure that a lot of people who staff women’s prisons will say we got this wrong and we got that wrong, but I’m hoping that we got the flavor right.”
“Yeah, and we wanted to respect people’s experiences,” Owen says. “It’s something that we cared a lot about getting right as much as we possibly could, and of course, fiction takes its own path, but we tried to stay true, even though the book is a fable.”
When the actual writing began, it sounds a lot like a dad and his son putting together a Lego kit: One of them would work on a section, while the other offered little bits and pieces. Then they would hand off that chunk for the other to build and complete before handing it back.
The only difference is, they didn’t fully know what they were constructing.
RELATED VIDEO: Stephen King’s It: Exclusive New Details on the Sequel
“There were things that I didn’t expect, but that’s the fun of it, man,” Stephen says. “It’s like going along the road and finding things that are valuable. You think you’re exploring a little cave, and then you find an opening, and there’s a huge cave behind it. Does that make sense?”
“I totally understand what you mean, Pop, and I think that was what happened,” Owen says. (Let’s pause to appreciate that Stephen King’s kids call him “Pop.”) “We didn’t exactly know what was gonna happen in the second half of the book until we got pretty deep into the first half, and then it all snapped into focus.”
Sometimes they deliberately wrote sadistic cliffhangers for the other to resolve. A sort of dare or challenge as they handed back the book. Owen says his father never failed to keep the plot from plummeting into the abyss.
“Every once in a while, there’d be something like, ‘I know what’s got to happen here, but I don’t know how the f–k I would write this,’” Owen says. “And he always could. It’s like these guy that build the hotrods in their barns and then go driving them at 200 miles an hour on the salt flats. My dad’s got that. He’s got a barn full of tools that he’s gonna find a way to put together and get us out of there.”
THE COBRA HYPNOTIST
Sleeping Beauties may be the first book they’ve co-authored, but as mentioned above, it’s not technically Stephen and Owen’s first professional collaboration.
That honor belongs to Crystal Ball, a villainous G.I. Joe character they concocted together back in the mid-‘80s, when Owen was a 9-year-old. Stephen wrote down a pitch, and sent it to Hasbro, which mass produced the toy in 1987 and put him in the Marvel comics.
“It’s true,” Owen says, sounding a little bit chagrined, and handing the credit (or blame) off to his dad. “I think that he’s much better suited to explain because, I think my contribution to the creative element was more limited to being like, ‘Yeah, Dad, that sounds awesome.’”
“Oh, I mean that is such bulls—,” Stephen King replies. “It was his idea! He had all the G.I. Joes and we watched it on TV, and we read the comic books.”
Stephen has pretty specific recall on that day. He says it was winter, snowy outside, and the two were going around the wide yard on cross-country skis. “He said, ‘Dad, it would be great if there was a G.I. Joe who could read minds.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, that would be really great. What would you call a character like that?’ And Owen said, ‘Crystal Ball!’”
The character has a lenticular holographic shield and looks a little like Vincent Price crossed with Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos.
Crystal Ball GI Joe CR: Hasbro
CREDIT: HASBRO
“I think the character that we wrote wasn’t particularly well-liked, which is the funniest part,” Owen says. “This is one of the reasons why I always feel like it’s dicey to even talk about this, because the G.I. Joe people don’t really like him.”
This does not wash with Stephen King, who dropped a mention of the toy in his 1987 novel The Tommyknockers. “I think Crystal Ball was one of the most popular ones!” he insists. There’s a clacking of computer keys on his end of the line. “I’m looking right now on the internet…”
“No,” Owen assures him. “He’s not particularly popular, but I like him.” Hasbro did, too, and the company was so grateful for the contribution that they named another G.I. Joe good guy, the recon ranger Sneak Peek, “Owen King” after the young fan.
The typing stops. “I’m gonna make you very unhappy,” Stephen says, like a doctor who has a folder full of bad test results to share. “I just scrolled through ‘The Top 50 Greatest G.I. Joe Characters of All Time,’ and… he’s not on it.”
“Would you believe — put this in the article somewhere — I don’t think Funko has sent him a Pennywise,” Owen says, eager to change the subject.
“The most popular G.I. Joe is what, Owen?” his dad asks. A pop culture test for the child of the ’80s.
Owen guesses Destro – the silver headed arms-dealing villain, who works with Cobra on its quest for world domination.
“No,” Stephen says, with a tsk of his tongue. “Snake Eyes.”
“Oh, yeah. That makes sense,” Owen replies.
Crystal Ball may not rank at the top, but that dastardly hypnotist still stands for something special. Most dads can buy their kids a toy, but not many can invent one with their son.
Sleeping Beauties and Crystal Ball don’t have a lot in common, but they do prove one thing: The work of a writer may seem solitary, but it’s actually a playground. And you can visit together.
No matter how old you are.
No matter where you live in the real world.
How The Stand Writer Owen King Helped Bring His Father's Pandemic Epic to Television
The writer and producer of the new CBS All Access series discusses how he adapted Stephen King's work for TV in this year, of all years.
By Gabrielle BruneyPUBLISHED: DEC 17, 2020
the stand book show differences
Elaine Chung
“The pandemic parallel makes me a little uncomfortable,” says author Owen King, “Because the suffering of real people is one thing. And artwork is really another thing.” The millions who’ve been hurt by the COVID-19 epidemic are real; the victims of Captain Trips, the viral super flu in his father’s now-classic novel The Stand, are fiction. That story’s dramatically deadly plague, which wipes out more than 99 percent of the American population and leaves bodies filling the streets, is very different from the quieter horror actually unfolding across the nation, where COVID-19 victims die in hospitals pushed to their limits while members of the same communities enjoy meals at restaurants or write articles about television shows.
But while the similarities may be few, the timing is still striking: A new adaptation of the novel, a CBS All Access limited series, is debuting in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. And the real and fictional plagues have one thing in common. In both the real world and in the post-apocalyptic epic, illness itself isn’t the main story—how human beings manage or mismanage it and cope with our losses is. And Owen King, just a toddler when his father’s novel was published, is one of the writers and producers who’s brought the post-apocalyptic epic to the small screen.
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The Stand tells the story of the plague’s survivors, who face a showdown of good versus evil as they congregate in opposing communities led by figures imbued with supernatural abilities. In Boulder, Colorado, the heroes, who include Stu Redman (played in the series by James Marsden) and Larry Underwood (Watchmen’s Jovan Adepo), gather under the guidance of elderly prophet Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg), while the baddies flock to Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), a denim-clad demonic cowboy. The novel finds Boulder residents rebuilding representative government. In Flagg’s Las Vegas, those who violate the malevolent dictator’s rules are literally crucified.
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For fans of the book, one of the biggest changes between the novel and the limited series is apparent from the show’s first minutes. CBS’s The Stand opens in Boulder, with the plague already over and survivors clearing out the corpses of the dead in order to make the city safely habitable. The novel, on the other hand, starts at the beginning, with a mysterious new illness escaping a military laboratory and lots of ominous coughing. The series’ early episodes transform the tale into a non-linear odyssey, jumping back and forth in time between the action in Boulder, the early days of the virus’ spread, and survivors’ slow and painful cross-country journey to their new homes.
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“The panorama of the story is so enormous in the book,” says King. “And so by creating this non-linear structure that sticks with essentially a first-person point of view of the different characters, you're able to narrow the scope a little tiny bit, and make it a little bit more manageable.”
The decision to begin the story in media res was made long before COVID-19, but it turned out to be a serendipitous one. It makes the pandemic less central to the tale, making post-plague Boulder the seat of the main action from the outset. If lengthy depictions of viral death and destruction are the last thing you want to see more of in 2020, don’t worry: while such scenes are definitely present in the show’s early installments, The Stand isn’t a nine-episode version of Contagion.
pictured l r jovan adepo as larry underwood and heather graham as rita blakemoor of the the cbs all access series the stand photo cr best possible screengrabcbs ©2020 cbs interactive, inc all rights reserved
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This isn’t the first time that The Stand has been turned into a miniseries, which also contributed to the decision to give the story a non-linear format. When it came to the story’s new structure, says King, “I think part of our thinking was that they did it linearly the first time.” His father’s novel was published in 1978, but an updated and expanded edition was released in 1990, taking the tale from an already sizable 823 pages to a mammoth 1,152 pages. In 1994, the story was adapted into an ABC miniseries written by Stephen King and starring Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, and Rob Lowe. For years, a new version was stuck in development hell before emerging at CBS All-Access under showrunner Benjamin Cavell and director Josh Boone.
King first read the story as a teenager, and instantly loved the work. (If you’re a Stephen King fan who hasn’t read all of the prolific author’s works, you’re not alone: Owen hasn’t made his way through all of his father’s novels yet, either. “I’m kind of a slow reader,” he says.) But as with any adaptation of a work this long, the writers had to make some tough cuts. One of King’s favorite sequences that didn’t make it to the screen tracked a web of infections, following the superflu’s transmission from a police officer who pulls over an insurance agent, giving him “more than a speeding summons,” to the diner eaters that the insurance agent infects, and on and on.
“That scene is so great,” says King. “And it sings for visual representation, right? You can imagine doing the cut, to cut, to cut, of the different people.”
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The ongoing pandemic isn’t the only real-world parallel present in the tale. With Skarsgård’s Flagg, the story finds its villain in a blonde-haired, populist authoritarian who thrives on cruelty, and it’s impossible not to be reminded of the still-current president. “One of the things about the Trump era is that it's been like a song that never stops playing. It's like this buzz in your ear that never goes away,” says King. “And so I think that it would be disingenuous to say that Trump and contemporary politics never entered into the conversation, because even if we weren't thinking about it, we were thinking about it.”
Whatever parallels to the current president exist in the adaptation come straight from the novel, says King. Flagg “is selling an easier, simpler way of life that doesn't exist, where there's a big guy who makes all the choices, and is always right, and you can just have faith in him. You can just put aside all morality and say, ‘This guy is going to handle it.’”
Owen isn’t the only member of the King family who worked to bring The Stand to television—Stephen King wrote the season finale, giving the story a new and yet-to-be revealed ending. But not the first time the two have collaborated, as they co-wrote the 2017 novel Sleeping Beauties.
“What I loved about doing that book was that we got to be father and son at a different time in our lives. I mean, we're always father and son—that never stops,” says King. But working with his father as an adult was “just a different moment than the other moments in my life when I was around my parents all the time.” After the novel, he didn’t plan to do “another Stephen King project” but, he says, “I felt like The Stand was so special I couldn't skip out.”
“I'm positive he would say this,” King says of his father’s approach to adaptations. “You can't go into it being like, ‘I'm not changing a thing,’ because it's not possible. You wouldn't even want to, because it's from 1975. There's no way to do it without being a little bit free with the story and thinking about how to update it. He wouldn't want an overly strict adaptation of it.”
Interview
'It's pretty murderous': Owen King on writing an apocalyptic shocker with his father Stephen
Alison Flood
Novelist Owen King.
‘People get torn apart’ … novelist Owen King. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
When Owen King, a writer of light comedy, had a ‘horrible’ idea for a novel, he knew who to ask for help. But Sleeping Beauties is not a horror, he insists – there are no ghosts or scary clowns
Alison Flood
Wed 6 Dec 2017 12.08 EST
Two years ago, a novelist called Owen King had “the littlest germ” of an idea for a book: “What if, one day, all the women in the world don’t wake up?” He loved it, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he usually wrote. His novels, while well-reviewed, never exactly set the charts alight. Fortunately, his father – one Stephen King – was something of an expert in post-apocalyptic horror. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, it would be just fucking horrible.’ I can tell my dad, it sounds like something he’d be really interested in.”Discussing story ideas with his father wasn’t something he’d done before. “My dad is always getting pitched stupid ideas,” says Owen, sitting in his publisher’s London office. “If he goes to the corner store, there’ll be somebody who walks up and says, ‘Boy, have I got a horror story for you, Steve. I’ve got your next horror novel right here.’ But he loved it. And I was like, ‘Do it!’” Stephen initially declined this offer, but Owen did not feel capable of writing the story himself. So they did it together.
Emblazoned with both King names, Sleeping Beauties is the result. The Aurora virus is sending women around the world to sleep. If they wake up, they become violent. As men try to deal with a world without women – and those few women still awake try to resist the virus – the Kings focus on the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, where the inmates of a women’s prison, including the mysteriously powerful Evie, are dozing off.
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen & Owen King review – King Sr’s return to form
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Despite his dad being onboard, Owen had misgivings. “I was wary of someone reading the book and being able to say, ‘Owen wrote this and Steve wrote that.’ We have somewhat different styles – and I didn’t think that was going to reflect well on me. His books have sold millions and I didn’t want people to say, ‘This part is great because Stephen wrote it and this part isn’t so great because Owen wrote it.’ I just didn’t think I would get a fair look, you know?”
So they hatched a plan. One of them would write 25 pages, leaving gaps for certain scenes, then the other could rewrite those pages and fill in the missing scenes. And so on. “There are places where I could tell who wrote what,” says Owen. “But very few.” He calls it “a fantasy novel more than a horror. It’s pretty murderous in places – a lot of people getting torn apart and shot and dying gruesomely – but it doesn’t have ghosts, there are no scary clowns.”
Stephen King at his home in Maine, USA.
Stephen King at his home in Maine, USA. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Guardian
Owen has always written stories. His mother, Tabitha, is also an author, and he started delving into his father’s work as early as nine. “My parents had a policy: if you can read something, go ahead.” But he wasn’t sure it was the career for him. “My parents would retreat to their offices every morning and proceed to type for seven hours. You could hear it thundering through the doors. I knew they were in there alone and it sounded like the worst possible profession. I wasn’t sure I wanted that to be my life.”
Owen’s wife, Kelly Braffet, is also an author. “She grew up in a little town outside Pittsburgh. People would tell her, ‘Well, you can’t do that when you grow up.’ That wasn’t the way it was for me. You obviously could.”
As he grew older, he became more convinced of the path he wanted to take. He studied creative writing, going on to teach it to adults. He wrote We’re All in This Together, a collection of stories, and Double Feature, a novel. “They were literary books. They didn’t sell enormous numbers. I was very happy with what they did.”
Owen’s older brother Joe is another writer. He chose to submit and publish his work (Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, NOS 4R2, The Fireman) under the name Joe Hill. He was eventually outed as the son of Stephen when he started to appear at literary events and fantasy fans began to say: “Doesn’t he look familiar?”
Owen decided against a pseudonym, and was overwhelmed by the interest that ensued. “I thought people would take one look and say, ‘He’s interested in family comedy and it’s totally different.’ I felt I would be a bit more under the radar. I was naive. I did get a lot of attention. I rolled with it as well as I could.”
He’s sanguine about it today. “The biggest thing was that I never want anybody to be disappointed, to pick up something I wrote and say, ‘I was really hoping there would be a ghost in here and it’s just people being foolish.’ I recognise that the first line of my obituary will be, ‘Son of Stephen King’, and I’m comfortable with that. I think Joe’s gotten more comfortable with accepting that, too.”
As for Stephen, earlier this month he tweeted: “I and both of my sons are together on the NY Times bestseller list, Sleeping Beauties at #4 and Joe’s Strange Weather at #9. Awesome!”
Owen and Stephen have no plans to collaborate again, though the right idea might change all that. “I’m 40,” says Owen. “I have my own family, I live in a different place – it was just very special that we got to have basically this 10-month phone call. I got to spend this time with my father, and that’s not something you get to do as an adult. I treasure that.”
Sleeping Beauties is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
King, Owen INTRO TO ALIEN INVASION Scribner (Adult Fiction) $17.99 9, 15 ISBN: 978-1-4767-6340-8
Novelists King (Double Feature, 2013, etc.) and Poirier (Modern Ranch Living, 2004, etc.) team up with debut artist Ahn for a graphic novel that's a madcap tale of college cliques, girl power, and oversexed body snatchers. When a sleazy college professor smuggles a sack of soil out of a notorious meteor-impact crater in Siberia, he figures he's a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize in astrobiology. But soon the microscopic alien life forms embedded in his pilfered permafrost thaw out into tiny blue bugs hellbent on infecting or devouring all human life--a scenario first played out in a Siberian village near the original meteor crash site in 1923 ("They made us pregnant," the lone survivor claimed. "They filled us with jelly!"). As the aliens spread across the professor's liberal arts college in Vermont, a hurricane strands a cross section of the student body--goths, bros, arty chicks, young Republicans, theater kids, Greeks, trustafarians, and the professor's star pupil, Stacey--who must grapple with classmates turning into towering humanoid insects or swollen egg sacks. Spurred by her superior intellect and a secret crush, Stacey takes the fight to the invaders. While the trajectory feels familiar, the story is told with energy and a subversive charm somewhere between Edgar Wright and Eli Roth. Small quirks like a claim that chicken nuggets grow in water ("Big as a Christmas ham!") win the day, while depictions of various college stereotypes (particularly a pair of bros with backward baseball caps and popped collars) are delightful grotesqueries. Ahn's illustrations have the clean, fat lines of animation stills as they depict tidal waves of goo and alien assaults, and her details (the stippling of a weak mustache) are enjoyably offbeat. Bookish Stacey's instant and unflinching acceptance of her role as alien-killer (and killer of infected humans, who mostly accept their doom) deflates some emotional heft, but the fun is too infectious to resist. An enjoyably irreverent diversion.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
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"King, Owen: INTRO TO ALIEN INVASION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A421459886/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62da039f. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023.
Intro to Alien Invasion. By Owen King and Mark Jude Poirier. Illus. by Nancy Ahn. Sept. 2015.224p. Scribner, $17.99 (9781476763408). 741.5.
When a fame-hungry professor smuggles a sample of Siberian permafrost on campus, he doesn't consider the consequences. But when blue beetles emerge from the sample and begin to literally get under students' skin, it's clear that there are stranger things afoot than an unscrupulous instructor at Fenton College. Further, a freak hurricane has cut Fenton off from the rest of the world, and Stacy and her friends have to band together to fight off bad boyfriends, evil instructors, and the possessed corpses of fellow classmates as they defend the planet from an alien invasion. A highly successful spoof of B-list monster movies, this story ticks all the boxes; horny college students, damsels in distress, megalomaniac evildoers, and aliens that are simultaneously cheesy and convincing. Though the thick-lined, cartoonish illustrations are largely unembellished, Ahn's attention to detail amps up the antics of a madcap story full of genre tropes and clever pop-culture references. The lovely twist here is that the damsels save themselves and almost everyone else, using both brains and brawn. Campy sci-fi fun.--Eva Volin
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association
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Volin, Eva. "Intro to Alien Invasion." Booklist, vol. 112, no. 2, 15 Sept. 2015, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A430801122/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=046c5c29. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023.
King, Owen THE CURATOR Scribner (Fiction None) $28.99 3, 7 ISBN: 9781982196806
Sprawling, densely populated, intricately plotted, King's new novel is the kind of book that practically begs to be called Dickensian--and the rare one that mostly earns the moniker.
Dora, who came of age at an orphanage amid squalor and cruelty after her beloved brother and then her less-beloved parents succumbed to cholera, has until recently been a domestic servant at the National University. The violent unrest that's convulsed the unnamed city has made her a refugee again, but this time she has a patron, an idealistic blueblood named Robert Barnes who's now a rebel officer. In a quest to find and reconnect with her dead brother, Dora gets Robert, her beau, to finagle a place for her--via a wartime field promotion to Curator--at the Society for Psykical Research, the occult institute where her brother worked before he died. Alas, it has burned to rubble, and so (a neat scratch-out on her appointment document does the trick) she settles for curating the bizarre, decrepit, automaton-filled National Museum of the Worker next door. As the city's beloved/despised cats and its factions of revolutionaries wrangle over the city, ordinary citizens suffer. Before long, a mystical Morgue Ship filled with souls mistreated during their lives is seen plying the city's waterways, even its paintings of waterways, and Dora begins to uncover ever deeper and more sinister conspiracies. The book can seem overstuffed at times--the wheels within wheels have wheels that occasionally get tangled in their wheels--but for the most part King carries it off successfully, with vivid prose, excellent minor characters, and a scrappy, every-which-way inventiveness. Best of all is the resistance he musters to sentimentality--this is a Dickensian (im)moral universe, yes, but if the arc of history bends toward justice, it's going to have to be because a working person wrenched and hammered it in that direction. Ever so slightly.
Dickens novel meets Hieronymus Bosch painting--dark, chaotic fun.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"King, Owen: THE CURATOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=103b80ad. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023.
Review
Sleeping Beauties
by Stephen King and Owen King
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Ironically, with the release of SLEEPING BEAUTIES, I feel like I woke up in the mid- to late-’80s. Stephen King not only has the #1 bestselling novel in the world, but also the #1 film with the record-setting adaptation of his classic work of horror, IT. I have to attribute the former to his son, Owen, with whom he co-wrote this terrific new book that is destined to be another supernatural classic.
I have to admit, as huge of a Stephen King fan as I am (yes, I was there from the start with the release of CARRIE), I was completely unfamiliar with the work of Owen King. King’s oldest son, who writes under the pen name Joe Hill, has already seen nice success with a more modern style of horror novels. Owen has had a novel, a short story collection and a graphic novel released under his name, but they somehow flew under the radar. All I can say is that SLEEPING BEAUTIES is on par with any of the classic work I loved from King back in the ’70s through the late ’90s. If working with Owen was the inspiration for that creative resurgence, I can only hope that they team up together more often.
"SLEEPING BEAUTIES is on par with any of the classic work I loved from King back in the ’70s through the late ’90s. If working with Owen was the inspiration for that creative resurgence, I can only hope that they team up together more often."
What King has always done best is take seemingly innocent, small-town settings and populate them with loads of colorful and very real characters. When these characters, who you cannot help but become attached to, come face to face with some form of evil, we find ourselves rooting until the sometimes bitter end. SLEEPING BEAUTIES has all of these elements and more. The premise of the novel is both simple and horrifying in its simplicity. Women around the world are going to sleep and not waking up. Their bodies become entombed by some lacey, spider-web-like mesh that appears to grow out of their own faces. The question for those left behind, mostly men, is why this has happened and, if they are not dead, where they have gone.
The cast of characters is so numerous that the Kings have added four pages of character names and identities at the start of the story to allow their faithful readers to keep score. The sleeping disease, named by some the Aurora Flu in honor of the Disney princess Sleeping Beauty, is initially isolated to just a few areas but quickly becomes a widespread worldwide event. The location of the novel is a small Appalachian town --- a nice departure from King’s usual Maine setting --- and the one character who begins receiving the most attention is Eve Black, a strange young woman nicknamed by some the Avon Lady. Eve seems to be one of the few who falls asleep without issue and keeps on waking up. Residents begin to note that she may not be a mere mortal. But does she represent good or evil?
Eve is among a series of women at an all-female penitentiary --- prison is always a favorite setting of King's --- having been held there as a prime suspect in a multiple homicide case involving meth and some really bad men. In fact, many of the men here are bad, unlikable guys. This is the only attempt the Kings make at an explanation for the sleeping disease. Maybe the level of bad behavior men have exhibited throughout history brought on this extreme form of punishment by taking their women away from them. Fans of King's work will see the many Easter eggs included within, like the use of a prison and a strange man driving a Mercedes.
Some of the men begin to find out the hard way the danger of trying to wake up the women or cut them out of their cocoons. The result is usually an extremely feral version of the women they knew, ravaging them in a fit of blind rage. Meanwhile, many of the ladies introduced in the novel who have since succumbed to Aurora now find themselves residents of a surreal version of their own town. The only differences are that there are no men, and it has the odd feeling of paradise. For them, this world is ever so much better than the male-driven one they left behind. Will they ever want to wake up and return to the harsh, insensitive world from which they departed? Occasionally, a female resident of this all-female Eden will disappear suddenly, the result of their cocooned body being burnt up or vanquished in some manner. It is a primitive way some men have resorted to striking back at this strange epidemic that they consider to be evil.
There are far too many characters to cover here. Aside from Eve, we have the female town sheriff, Lila, who is married to Dr. Clinton Norcross, a psychiatrist assigned to the women's prison. This, of course, sets up a classic good vs. evil showdown --- Dr. Clint defending the prison along with a few other men and a handful of non-afflicted prisoners vs. a small mob of very bad men headed up by former animal control officer Frank Geary, who has commandeered the local police squad once Lila fell asleep. The bad men want Eve turned over to them, but Clint and company refuse to do so. The climactic battle is well worth the wait and is classic King.
I never would have thought Stephen King capable of a feminist horror/fantasy tale, but he has put one together here with SLEEPING BEAUTIES. Is Owen's hand responsible for this departure as well? Perhaps. In any event, this father/son pairing is a huge success, and even at over 700 pages, it’s a thrilling novel that never lets up, loses interest or intensity, and is exciting right up to the very satisfying conclusion.
Reviewed by Ray Palen on October 5, 2017
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King
Scribner (September 26, 2017)
720 pages
Reviewed by Bev Vincent
The world has ended in many ways in post-apocalyptic fiction, but Owen and Stephen King have created a scenario unlike any other. It happens all at once, around the globe. Women who go to sleep (or are already asleep when the epidemic begins) won’t wake up. They form cocoons and go into a kind of hibernation. Disturbing sleeping women is a bad, bad idea: they attack anyone who breaks through the gauzy material.
Apparently pitching story ideas is a thing in the King family. Sleeping Beauties came about because Owen King suggested this idea to his father; it sounded like a Stephen King kind of story. The elder King immediately thought of all the possible ramifications of this concept, but told Owen he should write it. Eventually they agreed to work on it together.
Without women, mankind is doomed. With no more children being born, the population will eventually die off. However, women have been a moderating force on men throughout history. The Kings compare them to the original coolies, young men with barrels of water who kept the mining machinery from overheating. The near-future world is already in a precarious state, and men don’t react well to this catastrophe. Without women, they may bring about a quicker end of the world. Within hours, pointless riots and territorial skirmishes break out. The horror plays out on live TV and on social media, with misinformation and rumors spreading equally quickly. Insecure men suggest women deserve this fate because they have been achieving equality too quickly. Religious fanatics see the affliction as God’s punishment for feminism, stoking the fires of misogyny already prevalent in society.
Although Female Sleeping Sickness, dubbed “Aurora” after the Disney character, strikes everywhere at once, Sleeping Beauties concentrates mostly on the fictional Appalachian town of Dooling. Mining used to be the main industry in this region, but the primary business now is the women’s prison, which currently houses 114 inmates convicted of everything from theft and drug offenses to manslaughter.
Because Aurora appeared on a Thursday morning, Eastern Time, most women in Dooling are awake and well rested. The world record for going without sleep is 264 hours, but that’s an aberration and few will last more than a few days, even with the aid of pharmaceutical substances, both legal and illicit. Cognitive skills will become impaired. Sheriff Lila Norcross isn’t as fortunate as most: she’s been awake for eighteen hours already when the epidemic strikes.
Why focus on Dooling when this is a global catastrophe? A women’s prison is an interesting locus to explore the struggle to stay awake. Many of the inmates have been incarcerated because of trouble with a man, and often the man in question wasn’t prosecuted. “Men play, women pay,” one says. A few prisoners are dangerous and volatile, but most are well-behaved and compliant, doing their best to keep from getting black marks on their records that will interfere with parole. The guards are a mix of men and women, with one bad apple who takes advantage of his position of absolute authority—a man whose mother warns off his girlfriends because she knows how he behaves toward women. The warden needs to decide what measures to take to keep her charges, many of them drug addicts, awake. Should she even try, or let nature take its course? Sleep will come soon enough, so why fight it?
There’s another reason why the novel is set in Dooling. Though the disease was first reported on the other side of the planet, Dooling is ground zero for Aurora. A beautiful, naked woman who calls herself Evie Black arrives near a meth lab and goes on a murderous rampage. When Sheriff Norcross takes her into custody, she deliberately injures herself so she’ll be taken to the prison for psychiatric examination instead of to the lockup.
The first half of the novel covers the 24 hours after Aurora appears, introducing the characters and their pre-existing relationships, exploring the struggles of various women to remain awake, and ultimately launching two opposing factions against each other.
Evie is at the middle of this conflict. She’s no ordinary woman. She knows things about people and details about situations where she wasn’t present, and can communicate with animals. Most significantly, she can go to sleep and wake up again. Who or what is she, and what is her reason for being in Dooling? If she’s to be believed, the fate of the world will be decided here. She chooses Clint Norcross, the prison psychologist and Sheriff Norcross’s husband, to be “the man”—the one who stands for all mankind. He’s not a bad choice, though he’s far from perfect. Raised in the foster system, he has had to overcome his natural urge to fight his way out of trouble. He also has a tendency to annoy his wife by making unilateral decisions. A typical man, to Evie’s way of thinking.
Evie and Clint aren’t adversaries but uneasy allies. All Clint has to do is keep Evie alive for four or five days, and she might be able to fix things. No guarantees, but if she dies, the women will never wake up, she says. Why should she die? Because men will be men, and their solution to most problems involves violence. Once word gets out that a woman at the prison can sleep and wake up, a group of men decides to get their hands on her so she can be tested and experimented upon for a possible cure. It’s a reasonable enough strategy, but without women around to moderate them, men will fall prey to their worst inclinations.
The Kings also explore what the world would be like if it had been the men who went to sleep. Women could sustain the population using frozen sperm, even if male offspring went to sleep, too. A world without men wouldn’t be utopian, but it would be much more peaceful. No woman ever started a war, someone says, but wars have been waged over them. Women probably wouldn’t have caused riots if the roles were reversed. One way the sexes aren’t equal: they aren’t equally dangerous.
Even the best men behave badly at times, and those who already had violent tendencies are easily riled up. A couple of the town’s hotheads assemble a posse. The ringleader is Frank Geary, the town’s animal control officer, a man with a history of violent outbursts that have him separated from his wife and make his young daughter wary around him. Added to the mix is Don Peters, the recently fired prison guard who is male chauvinism personified. Geary isn’t a bad man, and he initially attempts to gain custody of Evie Black by legitimate, legal means. It’s only when Clint stymies and stonewalls him that he resorts to stronger tactics. A growing faction believes Evie may be a witch, and there’s one sure-fire way to destroy a witch’s curse. The solution involves an impressive array of weaponry.
Sleeping Beauties was originally conceived as a limited TV series. The Kings wrote a pilot and a follow-up episode before Owen said he felt hemmed in by the format. He wanted to explore the characters beyond what one-hour episodes allowed. For the next two years they tossed the novel back and forth, ending up with a long first draft. They subsequently revised each other’s work to the point where they’re no longer sure who wrote what, arriving at a third voice, distinct from either author’s solo work.
According to one female character, the sleeping epidemic is just one more thing men will never be able to understand because they are immune to it. That doesn’t stop men from continuing to tell women how to behave, though. The book arrives at a time when there is increasing awareness of feminist issues. Epigraphs include Mitch McConnell’s “Nevertheless, she persisted” quote about Senator Elizabeth Warren and lyrics from the 1966 Sandy Posey hit “Born a Woman.” Sexual harassment, prejudice, unequal pay, domestic violence and the pervasive male gaze are all tackled in the book.
Sleeping Beauties is a hefty volume with a large cast (helpfully listed at the front of the book). Its 700 pages span less than a week, and once the conflict begins in earnest—you could think of it as a sort of “stand”—the action never lets up. While socially relevant and timely, it isn’t a polemic. First and foremost, it is a gripping story spun out from an intriguing concept. The heroes and villains, such as they are, are realistic people who straddle the line between good and bad, and none are without the possibility of redemption.
Book Review: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King
Date: November 6, 2017
Author: Book It Blog
6 Comments
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What would happen in a world without women? Lucky for us, Stephen King and his son Owen King painted us a literary picture of that very scenario.
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First let me say, could you imagine if Stephen King was your Dad? I would think that your whole life would be filled with stories and memories of all sorts of crazy wonderful ideas shared between you and your father. When I read that Owen King was writing a novel with his father, I was overjoyed! I thought, this book is going to be amazing! In the past when I am reading books by Mr. Stephen King (my favorite author), my only general complaint is that he has a bit of an editing problem. He tends to have an amazing premise that sometimes goes off the rails in the middle but luckily he usually brings his stories home at the end. I say that as a complete writing amateur and a huge fan of his so really that is just an opinion of mine. With that being said, I thought maybe Sleeping Beauties would be a bit tighter story wise with less extraneous details. I was wrong, but I am ok with that for the most part. This story was extremely detailed as is the case with all of King’s novels. Stephen and Owen gave us a full two page character list before the book even began and everyone had a part to play, even a fox and a family of rats. Seriously! This is going to be a long review (seeing as how the book was 702 pages!) with lots of great quotes and details so I ask that you please take the time to read the whole thing. Before I get started, here is a summary of the story in nutshell:
In this spectacular father/son collaboration, Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?
In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent. And while they sleep they go to another place, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare.
One woman, the mysterious “Eve Black,” is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain? Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanting to kill Eve, some to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world.
Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a women’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.
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This book begins with a murder of some nasty men by a woman who is unnaturally strong. The police apprehend her walking down the street looking crazy and disheveled and the only name she will go by is Evie. Shortly after the book begins, a strange sickness affecting only women begins all around the world. Scientists, the media and the general public are calling it Aurora after Sleeping Beauty. Once a woman falls asleep, she is enshrouded in cocoon like material which she is able to breathe through but cannot be wakened without deadly consequences to whomever awakened her. All sorts of disasters begin occurring as women fall asleep including a plane crash! Side note: Have I mentioned how much I hate moths in previous posts? Haha, I can’t imagine why I would have. But in this book, moths are a main feature. The funniest thing happened when I was reading this late one night. I am sitting there reading an intense chapter, and a freaking moth flies right by my face! I literally jumped out off of the couch! Haha. Anyways…Evie brings moths wherever she goes, controls moths, uses them as ways to watch people, and the cocoons turn into moths when near a flame. Fun fact: A whole bunch of moths is called an eclipse! Another Fun Fact: Brown moths which are the ones in this book, are believed to bring sleep and dreams according to the Black Feet Indians.
As I was reading this book early on, a couple of things struck me as potential issues that would arise if all women went to sleep but were actually addressed at least partially as I continued to read: 1) I worried that even though the women showed signs of protecting themselves like we saw when their faces were exposed through their cocoons, would the same occur if they were sexually assaulted? 2) What about babies whose mothers went to sleep that didn’t have fathers or anyone else who knew to check on them? There was a cool loophole in the whole “don’t wake the women or they will kill you thing” that was added to the story which protected pre-adolescent boys who tried to wake their mothers. The moms would simply wake up enough to bring their kids to the nearest person, or just leave them outside. HAHA! The King Men certainly thought of everything when writing this book. Details I never would have thought to add like ways the women could stay awake. Drugs like speed and meth, pharmaceuticals like Adderall and Provigil, free coffee for all women at the local diner (plus they throw in free 32 milligram packets of caffeine powder). Women are exercising in the middle of town, Starbucks is still open at 2:45am and riots are breaking out at local shops over energy drinks. It’s like the apocalypse! Sheriff Lila Norcross and her husband Clint who is the Psychiatrist at the local women’s prison both immediately think ahead in the beginning of the crisis. The Sheriff tells her deputies to take inventory of the meth/speed/coke etc. type drugs and asks the pharmacists to be on alert and to use their discretion filling prescriptions like Adderall, Dexedrine and prescription meth (yes that’s a thing). Since the Sheriff is a woman, she is trying to get everything into place before she inevitably slips into sleep. She knows that being awake for too long will not only be difficult, it will make her a bit crazy towards the end.
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As is the case in many of King’s stories, there are a few nasty characters. One in particular is a prison guard named Don Peters who likes to take advantage of and blackmail the female prisoners. He is a sick man whose twisted way of thinking is so warped it’s almost funny. He thinks women come on to him when in fact they try to avoid him like the plague. Frank Geary is the City of Doolings Animal Control Officer who has anger issues. Once his daughter is cocooned, he will stop at nothing to get her back. When the crux of the story happens and you begin to understand what the main point of it is, these are the guys who are on the bad side as predicted. They reminded me of characters like Big Jim Rennie from a previous book of Kings Under The Dome (Click Here To Purchase On Amazon). Same kind of bad guys who decide to take charge when the world around them is collapsing.
I don’t want to give too much away about Evie, our supernatural type character. She speaks through the animals like the fox who has his own chapters (genius) and she calls upon the rats in the prison to do things for her. She knows everything and can basically read peoples minds. Here are some facts and quotes with regards to this fascinating character:
When she visits the world on the other side of the world her brain gets scrambled.
“You see how complete the problem is? I think it might be time to erase the whole man-woman equation. Just hit delete and start over.”
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Evie was around when the dinosaurs were on the planet.
“Just because I turned something on by myself doesn’t mean I can turn it off by myself but do you think angry frightened men would belive that?”
“Do you mean The Great Lesbian in the sky? A short, heavyset deity wearing a mauve pantsuit and sensible shoes? Isn’t that the image most men get when they think a woman is trying to run their lives?”
This book kind of boils down to what happens when women disappear, and the only way to get them back is for the men to behave in a way that is non-violent and peaceful. Is that possible? There is a great discussion to be had and is addressed in the book about how if the men were the ones to have fallen asleep instead of the women, then society could still function and go forward. Women are the ones who can pro-create and there is enough sperm frozen around the world (sorry to be so graphic) that really women could repopulate the planet if needed. Women have historically served as “coolies” restraining men at least when possible, from their very worst so when the women all go, the men would probably self destruct. There is a quote in the book says “Now it seems all the cookies are gone, or going. How long before men soon to be the only sex fall on each other with their guns and bombs and nuclear weapons? How long before the machine overheats and explodes?” In fact, many of the men commit suicide when this is all happening because they know that the world will end without the women.
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I know it seems like I wrote a lot in this review, but I promise I have not spoiled anything. You have an awesome journey ahead of you if you choose to read this book. Stephen and Owen write so epically wonderful. I heard Stephen King saying that during the writing process they would each write parts and then collaborate on others. One would start a passage and the other would finish it so that they both wrote everything in a sense and one of their voices wasn’t stronger than the others. I would be interested to learn more about who thought up certain characters and whose ideas were whose, but I am sure that adds to the mystery and the fun of collaborating on a story.
Here are a couple more things I thought were very well written quotes and things that really resonated with me:
“Dead men don’t accept apologies. Not once in the history of the world.”
“Clint and Lila had gone out to the back porch, the overhead light turning them into actors on a stage.”
About a newborn baby…”He just cried and cried. She imagined that he hadn’t actually known what he wanted, but hoped maybe his mother might fix it for him. That was the hurtful part of motherhood. Not being able to fix what you couldn’t understand.”
“Hours are days…the world was being formed as if the surroundings of their existence was an act of collective imagination.”
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“Men were taught (primarily by other men, of course) that they were to keep their pain to themselves. But she also knew that marriage was supposed to undo some of that teaching.”
“There was nothing like a pistol in a mans belt to make him feel like he had the right of way.”
“It was so undeniable like death was bright enough to scald your eyes, cool enough to go through your coat and your sweater and raise goose bumps along your skin.”
I hope you made it to the end of this loooong review (that was completely necessary I might add) to go with this loooong book. I gave it 5 Stars because once again Stephen King weaved an amazing original tale that was actually about a battle that has been the basis for stories told since the dawn of time when men were first created. I loved reading this and going along with the adventure it took me on. If I have one technical gripe it’s that I hate foreshadowing and that was done a bit in this book. That was a gripe I had when reading The Fireman (Click Here to Purchase On Amazon) by Stephens other son who writes under the name Joe Hill. I don’t read books to have what’s coming next spoiled for me and that’s what I feel like foreshadowing does.
Please let me know if you pick this as your next read and pleaaaasseee let me know what you thought when you finish.
Happy Reading!
Sleeping Beauties
Stephen and Owen King. Scribner, $32.50 (720p) ISBN 978-1-5011-6340-1
This delicious first collaboration between Stephen King (Doctor Sleep) and his son Owen (Intro to Alien Invasion) is a horror-tinged realistic fantasy that imagines what could happen if most of the women of the world fall asleep, leaving men on their own. No one in Dooling County figures the sickness will affect their rural Appalachian life, but TV images of women asleep and unable to be woken, with white membranous stuff wrapped around their heads, makes residents undeniably distraught. Dr. Clinton Norcross of the Dooling Women’s Correctional Facility finds himself unexpectedly in charge of 114 female prisoners when an unhappy guard slips a bunch of Xanax into the coffee of warden Janice Coates, causing her to fall asleep and succumb to the sickness. Clinton’s wife, county sheriff Lila Norcross, is called to the scene of a double murder and explosion; en route, she nearly runs down a half-naked woman standing in the middle of the highway. That woman, Evie, seems to have some connection to the peculiar goings-on, though no one knows what it might be. The authors’ writing is seamless and naturally flowing. The book gets off to a slow start because of the amount of setup needed, but once the action begins, it barrels along like a freight train. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary; Amy Williams, Williams Company. (Sept.)
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DETAILS
Reviewed on: 07/31/2017
Genre: Fiction
Compact Disc - 978-1-5082-3812-6
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-5082-3813-3
Hardcover - 978-1-4328-4240-6
MP3 CD - 978-1-5082-5034-0
Paperback - 978-7-5404-6428-8
The Curator
Owen King. Scribner, $28.99 (480p) ISBN 978-1-982196-80-6
King (Double Feature) expands his 2014 short story of the same name with arresting results in this Victorian-esque fantasy that contains moments of both horror and humor. The offbeat tone is evident from the outset, as the novel’s setting, a city nicknamed “the Fairest,” is described as jutting “from the body of the country like a hangnail from a thumb.” The Fairest is in turmoil following a popular revolt, sparked, in part, by the callous shooting of a businessman by a government minister. In the wake of the government’s collapse, Dora, a former servant, seeks to understand the meaning of her beloved brother’s cryptic last words before he’d died of cholera: “Yes. I see you. Your... face.” To that end, she obtains a position in an occult research hub, The Museum of Psykical Research, with the aid of her lover, Robert Barnes, an officer in the rebels’ civil defense force. Her increasingly desperate efforts to ascertain what her brother meant play out against the ongoing upheavals. King’s creative worldbuilding is admirable and he makes even walk-on characters feel fully realized. Fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will be especially enchanted. (Mar.)
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Reviewed on: 01/09/2023
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Compact Disc - 978-1-7971-4918-9
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-7971-4916-5
Library Binding - 979-8-88578-750-5